reticulator’s Comments

The cell carriers NEED the "3rd-party billing" process to be fast and loose, with no setup required, no authorization by the customer, no customer contact at all. It's all about defining "due diligence" for a new business practice - they want the bar set low. They are salivating over the prospect of skimming merchant fees and transaction charges from payment systems that use cell phones to replace credit and debit cards, and those systems will never be widely used if customers are allowed to sign up and perform authorizations on a per-merchant or per-transaction basis. NOTHING will EVER get the carriers to make 3rd-party billing complicated.

Please! A monopoly is not illegal in and of itself. What is illegal is abuse of monopoly power. Sometimes the consequence of abuse of monopoly power is the breakup of the monopoly. Sometimes, as with IBM in the early 60's, it's careful oversight to prevent recurrence.

I don't believe Mike has ever said that copyright itself should be abolished. He often says that abuses of copyright should be curbed.